Release The Geek

The origin story of Tegan Phillips, the artistic creator of Unclipped Adventure comics is quite incredible. Tegan started drawing comics purely as a way to win a bicycle and associated bicycle gear - winning that competition led to a number of incredible adventures including a one year, 11,000 km bike trip through the African continent with her family.

During these adventures, Tegan continued drawing comics documenting her experiences while she rode in various places around the world including New Zealand and Europe. This work has now become a full time job with her comics gracing tshirts, mugs and greeting cards.

One of the things that marks us geeks is passion. Geek passion is on display everywhere - from heated arguments online around whether Superman could beat the Hulk, to cosplayers spends dozens, even hundreds of hours making precise replicas of costumes as an homage to the character.

Passion in geek culture is undeniable, which makes the topic of this podcast potentially relatable, even if most geeks aren't necessarily interest in it.

This week's podcast is going to discuss sport, (Please, geeks, give it chance before skipping this episode to move on to another podcast). In particular, we're going to discuss cricket. Played mostly in Commonwealth or former Commonwealth nations, it's an incredibly popular sport around the world but in India ... the passion Indian fans have for the sport and their national team is unlike anything any other fanbase can muster.

Chetun Narula is a sports journalist and author based in Delhi, and has been following the Indian cricket team since 2011. During the Indian team's recent tour to South Africa, Chaytun covered the team and also played guest commentator during radio coverage of the matches. We reached out to Chetan to ask for his help in understanding of the depths of the passion Indian cricket fans have, and he was gracious enough to make time in his incredibly hectic schedule to discuss many things including his path to geekdom (there are Tintin references enough to keep the average geek interested), the moment on a Doha beach that led to his big career change from engineering, and how difficult it can be to negotiate the politics of covering the sport in cricket's biggest market.

Our last RTG episode spotlighted Gina Nelson, lead artist on the new mobile game Dragon's Watch. During our chat, Gina discussed what the design team was looking for when it came to the theme music for the game - they really wanted to music to be more than just 'background noise', but an enriching aspect of the game.

As it happens, Gina's father, Carlo Mombelli, is a South African bassist, composer, and educator - she suggested that he submit some samples to the game design team and they loved what they heard. Gina also gave some insight on Carlo's history, which sounded incredible.

We reached out to Johannesburg based Carlo, and had an incredibly entertaining discussion about his path to musical geekdom. As a quick example - as I record this intro, the largely self-taught Carlo is currently in Bern, Switzerland, where he's performing in a series of concerts.

Carlo was incredibly gracious with his time and we chatted about many things including how he fell in love with the bass guitar, how he created the soundtrack to Dragon's Watch with acoustic instruments (sometimes, custom made for the sound), and how he got his first performance gig - singing at a restaurant as the lead-in entertainer for one of South Africa's well known exotic dancers.

Gina Nelson is a young South African developer who became enamoured with the computer game industry and quickly decided that this was the career for her. After working with local game dev company ‘Luma Arcade’, Gina set off to the UK to seek her fortune, and has landed the role of Art Lead for London games studio ‘The Secret Police’ - a company that comes with some impressive credentials. In late 2017, Gina, as part of the ‘The Secret Police’ team, launched their first game: 'Dragon's Watch' - a fantasy RPG game with over 700 heroes to collect and evolve through multiple levels as you attempt to rescue dragons in order to save the kingdom. On Monday, GeekXP will be posting a full review of the ‘Dragon's Watch’ game itself plus details of a competition just for ‘Release The Geek’ listeners. We'll be asking a question in that article, but you'll only be able to get the answer on this podcast which is ... Tin Fingers. Check out geekxp.co.za on Monday, 26th of Feb to find out more.

But back to Gina, who was kind enough to share with us her path to geekdom, how she fell in love with both art and game design, and the secret behind the amazing soundtrack to ‘Dragon's Watch’.

In late 2017, Gina, as part of the The Secret Police team, launched their first game 'Dragon's Watch' - a fantasy RPG game with over 700 heroes to collect and evolve through multiple levels as you attempt to rescue dragons in order to save the kingdom. On Monday, GeekXP will be posting a full review of the Dragon's Watch game itself plus details of a competition just for Release The Geek listeners. We'll be asking a question in that article, but you'll only be able to get the answer on this podcast which is ... Tin Fingers. Check out geekxp.co.za on Monday, 26th of Feb to find out more.

But back to Gina, who was kind enough to share with us her path to geekdom, how she fell in love with both art and game design, and the secret behind the amazing soundtrack to Dragon's Watch.

Back in 2015, we interviewed Johannesburg author Natalie Rivener, who had taken on the task of co-ordinating an array of South African authors to self-publish an anthology of stories. The group were instructed to use the imagery of the phoenix as their short story inspirations and the Flight of the Phoenix became available from Amazon via digital and print-on-demand versions

Now, three years later, Natalie has braved the perils of herding cats once again to produce a new anthology, with the idea of Fire playing the inspirational muse. The new book, Phoenix Fire, officially launches on the 24th of this month with an event hosted by the Nexus retail and gaming venue in Randburg, so if you're in Johannesburg you should definitely pop by from 2 pm, pick up your copy and get it signed by the authors.

We sat down to talk to not only Natalie about the ups and downs of producing this particular edition, but also to chat to a first time published author who contributed to Phoenix Fire - and he's a name and voice regular listeners will instantly know.

In 2016, we interviewed Kelan Gerrity from ‘Sera Blue’, a new age publishing company based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kelan, a writer herself, offered a very interesting promotion - if you purchased a copy of her book, ‘Crimson Skies’, you could submit a story idea that ‘Sera Blue’ would edit and publish for free.

After a long and challenging process, due to the quality of the entries, Sera Blue declared a winner - Joburg based writer Jason Hes, for his horror novel submission, ‘Our Immaculate’.

We recently sat down with both Jason and Kelan to discuss Jason's path to geekdom, the competition process overall, and how Jason came upon the ideas that formed the basis of his horror story.

For a number of years, Bravado Gaming has been THE dominant force in the South African esports scene. Last weekend (Jan 21st), Bravado got 2018 off to great start by taking out the World Electronic Sports Games African qualifiers which sees them off to China in March to compete in the World Finals.   But that isn't the biggest news around Bravado Gaming. On January 17, the team announced that the CS:Go squad are relocating to the United States - South African teams have always struggled to compete against northern hemisphere teams due to the sheer physics of distance. By shifting to the US, Bravado will be competing against America's best on a level playing field.   We sat down to chat with Bravado Gaming CEO Andreas Hadjipaschali at Bravado's new boot camp headquarters in Johannesburg to talk about the origin of Bravado Gaming and it's how it plans to take over the US.

The Star Wars: X-Wing Miniature Game has, in a few short years, managed to become the top ranked tabletop game around the world. So how is it doing in South Africa? Release The Geek chatted with Gerhard Pretorius and Shaun Rushmer from the Mole Men Gaming Group, based in Johannesburg, to discuss the game, its basic mechanics, and the factors that make it one of the most popular tabletop games around.

To believe Jim Zub's bio on his website, he's merely a writer, artist and art instructor based in Toronto, Canada, but that would belie the incredible amount of work Jim does.

Not only does he currently have multiple comic projects on the go at one time, including The Uncanny Avengers for Marvel and Wayward, a modern supernatural story about teens fighting Japanse mythological monsters for Image ... but he's also an animation teacher and program co-ordinator for a local college. Further, he manages a Patreon account that truly gives you access to the 'behind the scenes' of his work, but also somehow finds the time to give new creatives advice through an amazing catalogue of industry tutorials as well as giving direct advice when he can via his Twitter feed.

Jim was gracious enough to conjour an hour out of his hectic schedule to chat to us about many things including is path to geekdom, his love of roleplaying and comic books, how he got his start in the comics industry and what it was like to finally land the job of handling . Plus, Jim lets us know just how often he might drop some sneaky callbacks into his stories.

Dave Gibbons is, to put it simply, a titan in the comic book field. While it's easy to say that he might be best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on Watchmen, Inkpot and Jack Kirby award winner Gibbons has massed more than an enviable body of work: he co-created Rogue Trooper alongside Gerry Finley-Day for 2000 AD, also working on Judge Dredd, Dan Dare, the Harlem Heroes and the ABC Warriors for the same publication; Gibbons worked with Moore again to create what is widely acknowledged as one of the best Superman stories of all time, "For The Man Who Has Everything", working alongside Len Wein, Gibbons made John Stewart the primary character of green lantern; and in a synergistic full circle, worked on the title that was his favourite as a child - "World's Finest" staring Superman and Batman.

Dave was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat to us about a range of topics including his path to geekdom, getting his first comic book assignments, and who is still on his bucket list to work with.

Dave was gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat to us about a range of topics including his path to geekdom, getting his first comic book assignments, and who is still on his bucket list to work with.